Primary Maths Outreach

News - Mar 19

On 5th March, we held a Maths enrichment day for Year 4 students which over 40 of our Year 12 students had spent several weeks preparing for. With over 75 Year 4 students from eight different primary schools, this was a very productive day.  

The Sixth Formers showed excellent leadership throughout the day and feedback from the Primary teachers was wonderful: ‘Our children came back incredibly enthused and challenged. The Colyton pupils who ran the sessions were incredible’. The positive feedback made it all the way to Church on Sunday when a Year 4 pupil told everyone that coming to this Maths event was the highlight of her week.  

This is what one of the Sixth Formers said about their experience:  

This week, we helped to run a Maths Outreach Event named ‘Mathsterpiece’ for Year 4s from various local Primary Schools, giving the children the chance to take part in activities including Countdown, maths crosswords, a maths murder mystery and more. Our group ran a Caesar Cipher activity in which we would explain how a cipher works, as well as some of its history, before allowing the children to encode a message for their friends to decrypt. Whilst an outwardly simple concept, the Caeser Cipher at first proved harder to explain to the children than we were expecting, leading to some confusion. However, by the end of the day, we had managed to refine our explanation to the point where almost all participants were able to successfully encode and decode messages. It was great fun for all involved (including us!) and a huge thank you to Mrs Hudson for putting the event together!  

We would like to say thank you to all the Year 12 Maths students involved as we could not have run the day without them. We are very proud of them and how they represented the school community.